The touching scene in “Our Town” where Dr. “There are times,” he wrote to his brother when he was twenty-eight, “when I feel his perpetual and repetitive monologue is trying to swamp my personality, and I get an awful rage.” Much of Wilder’s work echoes, however subliminally, his struggle to break away from Amos Wilder’s unrelenting need to dominate his life, his ideas, even his soul. (Do we really need to know, for instance, that his sister Isabel, in England in her early twenties, “studied Old English embroidery and design at the Oxford City-County Council School, and audited a ‘celebrated course’ in Restoration drama at Lincoln College as well as an English literature course at Christ Church”?) Too little, in that she ignores (or doesn’t recognize) disturbing complexities in Wilder’s nature and slides past episodes and relationships that are less than attractive.Īnd yet she gets a good deal right, beginning with her understanding that family- his family-was at the core of Wilder’s existence, and that his father was the overpowering presence in his psyche. Too much, in that the detail is too undifferentiated. Niven gives Wilder her all, and it’s both too much and not enough. Is there a high school in America that hasn’t staged it? I myself, in my senior year-back in 1948, when the play was only ten years old-was attempting, against the odds, to be New Englandy as the Stage Manager.Īnd now Wilder has inspired a very long, thorough, and somewhat misguided biography, “Thornton Wilder: A Life” (HarperCollins), by Penelope Niven, who has produced comparably exhaustive tomes about Carl Sandburg and Edward Steichen. And, of course, “Our Town” goes on and on and on and on. “The Bridge of San Luis Rey” is still being assigned to teen-agers in school (it sells about seven thousand copies a year), though what they make of it is beyond my imagining.
What is left of Thornton Wilder, our only writer to have won a Pulitzer Prize for both drama (twice) and fiction, and at one time a kind of semi-official cultural spokesman for America? The Library of America has devoted three volumes to his work-sometimes the kiss of life, sometimes the kiss of death. With the success of “Our Town,” Wilder was not merely a famous writer but a sage.
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